JFKA CTs need to believe a government agency or rogue actors thereof killed JFK

[Jon Banks]

But your problem here is that almost all of that was approved or ordered by Presidents (Cointelpro was done by the FBI). E.g., the covert war on Cuba essentially ended after JFK was killed.
 

False.  In fact, LBJ approved the execution of Che Guevara.  The CIA continued supporting Cuban exile militias/terrorists into the 90s.

You can argue that LBJ dialed back our focus on Cuba after the Kennedy assassination but our covert operations against Cuba lasted throughout the Cold War and intelligence ops against Cuba continued into the Obama administration under USAID.

Why do you think that happened? Did you read the Weiner book on the CIA? The nasty stuff was on orders of Presidents. Ike, JFK, Nixon. I think that's why leftists like I.F. Stone and Chomsky, and a few others, didn't and don't believe in the "CIA did it" conspiracy. They knew who JFK was and they knew that many of the awful things the CIA did was on orders. It wasn't a rogue agency.

Have you read the unredacted Schlesinger-JFK memo?

How can you read that memo and not be convinced that the CIA went rogue in the 1960s? (I tend to believe they were more rogue prior to the Church investigations than they are today FYI)

How can you read President Truman's call for the CIA to be reeled-in a month after Kennedy's assassination as anything other than suggesting that Presidents don't fully control the agency? (Dulles, who was no longer officially with the agency at that time, tried to stop Truman from publishing the letter)

Truman in 1963: "Limit CIA Role To Intelligence" - https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/TrumanLimitCIA.html

You seem like a smart guy so I assume it's that you're in denial, not naive.

The idea that the CIA did bad things A, B, and C (and they did terrible things) means they killed their own President and then others went along to cover it up is preposterous.

Did I say that? No. I said it's plausible that they were involved. I remain open to other explanations but, no, I don't think it's implausible that the JFK assassination was an inside job.

There are many reasons why, including the pattern of unethical behavior by the CIA and the FBI over the course of the history of those agencies.

You are not talking about the national security state. You are talking about almost the entire government and news media.

I believe the mainstream news media has been complicit in the cover up over the last 60+ years.

I do not believe the entire government or the news media was complicit in the actual plot against JFK.

You don't actually think someone like Hersh would cover this up? The same people who exposed the abuses you mentioned have covered up for the murder of JFK?

I respect Sy Hersh's and Noam Chomsky's work on other topics but they are wrong about JFK. Everything we've learned in the declassification of JFK files since the 1990s has corroborated the claims that JFK didn't trust the CIA, or the Joint Chiefs, and that JFK wanted to get out of Vietnam.

Whether or not Kennedy would've followed through on pulling out of Vietnam had he not been killed is impossible to know. But there's now a mountain of evidence proving that he did in fact want our troops out of Vietnam.

[Jon Banks]

The KGB* (under one of its earlier names) murdered 2 - 3 million people in Ukraine in the 1930s by confiscating their harvests and letting them starve to death, millions of Soviet citizens were killed in "the Gulag" under Stalin and Soviet dictators, and your buddy, "former" KGB officer Vladimir Putin, murdered 307 of his own citizens in the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings so that he could become president and start the Second Chechen War and oh yeah, help Assad bomb and poison people in Syria, etc, etc.

*Today's SVR and FSB

How many millions of people did our government kill between Vietnam in the 1960s and the Middle East today? Easily several million between Vietnam and Iraq alone.

Trump is mass murdering innocent people in Yemen while also assisting Israel's mass murder of Palestinians.

He is also kidnapping immigrants and sending them to a gulag in El Salvador.

We are not exceptional.

[Richard Smith]

Well we know for a fact that several government agencies participated in cover-ups relating to the Kennedy assassination. Both the FBI and CIA admit it. Other agencies haven't gone as far in admitting to cover ups but we know the Secret Service and Defense Dept suppressed some evidence too. What we don't know is "why" the need for a cover up when LHO was just "a lone loser"?

To the extent the FBI or CIA participated in any "cover up" it was to protect themselves from criticism that perhaps they should have kept better tabs on Oswald.  At worst it was CYA.  To extrapolate from that to participation in a conspiracy to assassinate the president, frame Oswald, and kill the patsy is light years in difference.

[Jon Banks]

To the extent the FBI or CIA participated in any "cover up" it was to protect themselves from criticism that perhaps they should have kept better tabs on Oswald.  At worst it was CYA.  To extrapolate from that to participation in a conspiracy to assassinate the president, frame Oswald, and kill the patsy is light years in difference.

All of the above are possible, including complicity in JFK's murder. Neither of us can draw any airtight conclusions about the why because neither of us are in a position to know what secrets they wanted to hide or are still hiding.

 

[Tom Graves]

How many millions of people did our government kill between Vietnam in the 1960s and the Middle East today? Easily several million between Vietnam and Iraq alone.

Trump is mass murdering innocent people in Yemen while also assisting Israel's mass murder of Palestinians.

He is also kidnapping immigrants and sending them to a gulag in El Salvador.

We are not exceptional.

Trump is probably more your fault than mine, Banksie, because gullible Far-Lefty that you are, you've probably been more than willing to spout KGB*-promulgated anti-government CTs (including those about the JFKA) which have had the cumulative effect over the past sixty-plus years of making our body politic sufficiently cynical, paranoiac, and apathetic as to enable "former" KGB officer Vladimir Putin to install his "useful idiot" (or worse), Donald J. Trump, as our "President."

*Today's SVR and FSB

[Jon Banks]

I want to elaborate on my earlier comment to Steve about the CIA going rogue for more clarity:

Do I believe it's plausible that plotting JFK's assassination was ever official CIA policy? No. I don't think the CIA director ordered a hit on Kennedy.

At worst, I find it plausible that some individual CIA officers and contractors went rogue against Kennedy. Which is close to the HSCA's conclusion.

A year or so ago, I listened to a podcast that featured legendary CIA officer, Felix Rodriguez. In explaining the differences between the CIA today and the 1960s, he basically said, back then, they would do unethical stuff and let the CIA's lawyers clean it up afterwards. In contrast, today, the CIA officers talk to lawyers before proceeding with operations.

Under the context of the CIA's earlier years when there were agents who did some things that they had to hide from the President and even the CIA director, I don't find it implausible that some CIA operatives could've been involved in a plot against JFK. Recently declassified files have confirmed that upper levels of the CIA didn't know much about some of James Angelton's most secret operations. He hid stuff from everyone, including people who worked closely with him. And it's well known that CIA officers hid stuff from John McCone, Kennedy's pick for CIA director, after Dulles was fired.

If all of that is true or even suspected of being true, it would be in the interest of the CIA as an agency to cover up any potential links to Oswald or the Kennedy assassination rather than come clean about the possible involvement of their guys.

It's that context which explains why the CIA didn't disclose to the HSCA that George Joannides ran the DRE at the time when LHO was engaging with their operations in New Orleans. And why James Angelton lied under oath to the HSCA about his interest in Oswald prior to the assassination.

[Richard Smith]

How many millions of people did our government kill between Vietnam in the 1960s and the Middle East today? Easily several million between Vietnam and Iraq alone.

Trump is mass murdering innocent people in Yemen while also assisting Israel's mass murder of Palestinians.

He is also kidnapping immigrants and sending them to a gulag in El Salvador.

We are not exceptional.

Trump is massing murdering innocent people in Yemen?  Yemen is a terrorist state that fires on US warships and international shipping like pirates.  Israel is mass murdering Palestinians?  You mean the barbarians who attacked them murdering and raping and taking hostages including infants that they hold to this day?  The same people who have vowed as the formal policy of their government to wipe out Israel and the US off the face of the map in an act of genocide.   And you are concerned about an illegal alien who beat his wife and had ties to criminal terrorist gangs.  That's the guy you are concerned about?  Did you voice concern for the "Maryland women" who was a US citizen who was abducted, raped, beaten to death with a rock by an illegal alien?  Was she not "exceptional" enough for you?